Silence, Music, and Deep Prayer 7

This evening, we surveyed a bit of the monastic contribution to contemplative prayer and the prayerful music of our friend Brother Stefan Waligur.

I was assisted with some of the singing by soprano Blair Boak, a recent graduate of Southeastern. She started our musical time with a beautiful rendering of Stefan's "Consider the Lilies," which is a setting of Jesus' admonition to trust in God's provision as conveyed in Matthew 6. The song is also a moving expression of the trust to which a monk, and particularly an itinerant one, is called.

Listen here to another friend, Sarah Jessop, sing "Consider the Lilies" with the composer at the piano. (Some participants in our class, as well as readers of this blog, might be interesting in purchasing recordings of Stefan's music. Those can be ordered here.)

A favorite picture with Stefan

Stefan Waligur

Kathy and I met Stefan a little over ten years ago at Andrew's House, the house of hospitality for Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.. Stefan was the only other person staying there on that occasion and he bravely and compassionately came to check on us one morning because we had been violently coughing all night. He shared a CD of his music and we found that listening to his music almost instantaneously drew us into a sense of God’s presence. I was inspired by the vision behind his CD, and my experience of it helped to end a creative block regarding composition that had frustrated me for a long time. Since then, we have been involved with Stefan in planning various concerts, retreats, and school visits.

 

Stefan is from Buffalo, NY where music had a tremendously positive role in his youth. He went on to study music and theology in various settings, worked as a minister and then as a chaplain at American University. He has taught at Memphis Theological Seminary and has pursued extensive studies in Celtic traditions. He’s now an oblate of a Benedictine community and lives out his monasticism through poverty, celibacy, and activism expressed by peacemaking and proclaiming God’s love.

It seems to me that Stefan's work en-musics the late Gordon Cosby's call to "be with the poor." While Stefan was trained in the traditions of Classical concert music, his great contribution is in the area of worshipful music that is accessible to participation by all. Indeed, it focuses us on being together, not just with professional singers and instrumentalists who read notes quite well, but also with those neighbors who don't have the skills to read words in their native tongue. It is music for those with comfortable homes in which to sing but also for those who sing day and night in the cold on the street. It creates a space for the Spirit to extend hospitality to everyone whether they be believers, seekers, or non-believer's, and whether we see them as friends or enemies.

 

Here is an excerpt from Stefan's website describing his distinctive musical style:

"After a life-changing visit to the Taize Community in France (he) began to write music in a similar style . . . but incorporating American rhythms and harmonies, Celtic tunes, and the call and response style of Indian ragas." 

Our worship this evening

This evening, we worship following the organization of the Mass Ordinary so as to reveal more layers of meaning in our experience of Stefan's music. Most of the songs we sing come from his collection, Songs of Peace, which includes music composed for a weekly meeting of homeless men.

In recent weeks, our own Father Reid has been stressing that Christianity is intensely counter-cultural. He has reminded us that, “There are lots of reasons to hate people, but no biblical ones,”and that being driven by wealth and possessions is clearly not what Jesus what calls us to.

These words are easy to understand, and we might prefer to file them away in some safe corner of our minds. But they need to move from the head to the heart so they can shape the way we live. The mood and repetition of Stefan’s music are intended to slow us down in such a way that the words can make that vital journey.

In the foreword to Songs of Peace, Stefan writes:

"Essentially these are songs to be prayed; in other words, sung prayer: an ever essential human expression, both ancient and ever new. Their chant-like repetition invites us into a prayer of the heart which transcends words, and brings us to that place of encounter. This is a place of humanity fulfilled, a way of being, an openness, a universal love. It is that original childlike trust and delight in God; in the midst of all things, the peace of God."

Kyrie

"Lord Have Mercy" 

page 36 in Songs of Peace

It occurs to me that we need to pray for mercy for many things, not just for our sins as individuals.

We need mercy to face the complexities of our lives –

mercy for dealing with thoughts and feelings that we're not sure we can share without being judged

mercy for processing things we’ve seen or heard that we might not be able to talk about with anyone

mercy for coping with things that have been done to us

And we need to pray for mercy for the whole world, for issues of suffering and unrest on a global scale.

Many of Stefan's prayerful pieces end on inconclusive, open-ended cadences. This is is so that, even when the singing stops, the prayer might continue within us. 

Gloria/Credo

"When I Listen to You" 

page 46

You can listen to a sample from Stefan's own recording here.

Appropriate to both the Gloria and the Credo, the message of "When I Listen to You" is one of God's glory and peace on earth. It also coveys something very important for us to believe.

On Sunday, we heard these sublime words which are a part of Eucharistic Prayer D:

"It is truly right to glorify you, Father, and to give you thanks;
for you alone are God, living and true, dwelling in light
inaccessible from before time and for ever.

Fountain of life and source of all goodness, you made all
things and fill them with your blessing; you created them to
rejoice in the splendor of your radiance."

God is radiant and sometimes we discover that aspect of God's image in the radiance of a child, a spouse, or a friend. This discovery stirs our tenderness and we desire to be kind to those radiant ones. This stirring of tenderness might also remind us of the intimacy with which God made us. 

Our challenge is to expand this caring gaze in the Spirit beyond those whose radiance has stirred our tenderness, beyond those who are easy for us to love –

to the co-worker who aggravates us with issues that are not the priority they think they are

and to the person who shares our church pew but not our political view . . .

 

If we find it a struggle to build our ethics on the fundamental fact that humanity is made in God's image as described in Genesis, we might find Jesus' way of putting very motivating. I wonder how literally we take this passage.

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³ and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. ³⁴ Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ³⁵ for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶ I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ ³⁷ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸ And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹ And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ ⁴⁰ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ - from Matthew 25

Sanctus/Benedictus

"We Are Beloved of God" 

page 45

This song expresses the essence of the Sanctus and the Benedictus as it celebrates the sanctifying love of the holy Christ in becoming one of us.

As Stefan puts it, this song addresses two questions: 

Who am I? 

and 

Who is God?

Our answers to these questions indicate something about how much we truly believe God loves us.   

Stefan's points out that "Jesus’ baptism answers these questions and his baptism is our experience."

⁹ In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰ And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹ And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” - from Mark 1

Stefan writes:

"As we begin to see ourselves as beloved children of God, we see our true selves. This song came from reflecting on the moment in Jesus’ life when he heard the voice of God saying to him, “You are my beloved child.” When we listen, we, too, hear these deeply beautiful words addressed to our own hearts."

Agnus Dei

"Lamb of God" 

from Celtic Mass

You can listen to a sample from Stefan's own recording here.

 

In his Celtic Mass, Stefan seeks to quicken the deep pulse of Irish folk-song within the walls of the Church. He sets this "Lamb of God" to a tune by Turlouch O’Carolan who was a blind itinerant harpist at the turn of the 18^th century. I imagine Stefan feels some affinity with O'Carolan as a traveling retreat leader and musician.

Similar to Alice Parker’s setting of the Agnus Dei, Stefan’s setting emphasizes the lamb-ness of Jesus to shift our minds and hearts away from violent images.

In Revelation 5 we learn that, of all the possibilities, it is the Lamb who will be worshiped by the beasts and the elders with harps and prayers of saints. It is the that slain lamb that “ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands of angels proclaim to be “Worthy to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.”

And at the heart of the Mass, the sacredness of this non-violent Lamb has been enshrined for centuries. 

Dismissal

"All Shall Be Well" 

page 24

We conclude our evening by singing the famous comforting words of the 14th/15th century mystic, Julian of Norwich. Between choruses, we read further excerpts from her Revelations of Divine Love, chosen for the occasion by Dr. Cameron Hunt McNabb. These are copied below.

"Our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. I saw that for us he is everything that we find good and comforting. He is our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love, so that he can never leave us, being himself everything that is good for us." - Chapter 5

"Where truth and wisdom truly are, there is truly love coming from both of them, and all of God's making; for he is supreme unending truth, supreme unending wisdom, supreme unending love, uncreated; and man's soul is a creature within God which has these same qualities in a created form, and it always does what it was made for: it sees God, it contemplates God, and it loves God." - Chapter 44

"And from the time that this was shown, I often longed to know what our Lord meant. And fifteen years and more later my spiritual understanding received an answer, which was this: 'Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love. Hold fast to this and you will know and understand more of the same; but you will never understand or know from it anything else for all eternity.'" - Chapter 86

 

With Blair Boak and Dr. Rickey Cotton

Silence, Music, and Deep Prayer 6

Silences of Lent

While we have been cultivating an interior silence in this course, tonight I would like to explore the physical and metaphorical silences and silencings of Lent. While doing so, we will re-emphasize themes of pilgrimage and God’s transcendence.

Bracketed by Silence

The Lenten journey begins with the procession into the Ash Wednesday service. As the procession enters, we stand in silence. We do not beautify the moment with singing or bells or organ music. Instead, we watch as the cross passes by without a sound. If you are like me, you sometimes wonder if the cross is going on without you or if you are truly following.

We feel these quiet moments in something akin to slow motion. Their silence lets us know that something out of the ordinary is beginning.

By the time Lent is drawing to a close on Maundy Thursday, we will have learned much more about the journey. The solemn and mysterious silence of Ash Wednesday will become a shocked silence of disbelief as we see where the journey has led. We will leave the sanctuary without a word.

Dust

We begin Lent at the end of ourselves. Our Ash Wednesday liturgy starts us on the Lenten path by repeatedly asserting that, someday soon, we will be nothing but dust again. At that time, no one will be hearing anything else from us.

Alleluia

On Ash Wednesday, we also stop saying “alleluia” in worship. That special worship word goes underground and we pretend we've never heard it.

“Alleluia” is a transliteration from Hebrew and is an exhortation to praise God. It is a word that emphasizes that God is the self-existent One, and it is used by those in God’s presence in Revelation 19. When we say it, we celebrate the fact that the kingdom of God has come. But in Lent, (just as in Advent) we recognize that the fullness of the Kingdom is yet to come, that some aspects of God’s reign are not complete. Thus, we wait until Easter to say “alleluia” again.

In the Desert

On the first Sunday of Lent, we hear that the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert, a place of relative physical silence. Those who visit such wilderness places are struck by their qualities of “silence as eternal as time itself. Silence for thinking deep thoughts, or for simply existing, hanging suspended in a sea of canyons and cliffs, of life and of death.”

Angels ministered to Jesus after his temptations, but it doesn’t seem that God was particularly present to him during his experiences of being tempted. That fits with the broader picture of temptation in the Bible as well as our own experiences. The psalmist repeatedly describes a sense of abandonment when in need, and today, we find that temptations are not really tests of our moral fiber, occasions to which we can rise. Real temptations come when we feel powerless, alone, and maybe even unsupported by God. Ideally, we respond by pursuing God, and that changes us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer explores this dynamic in his Biblical study Temptation.

Doubt

Sometimes, when we feel we’ve lost track of the voice of God, we are drawn into doubting and fear, but occasional doubts might not really merit our panic.

Being made in God’s image, we are imaginative. Our brains routinely ask “What if?” Much of the time, those what-if questions help us. For example, as we drive we consider, “What if that car veers into my lane?” Such questions prepare us for possibilities. As part of our what-if habit, we sometimes wonder, “What if God isn’t really there?” Posing such questions is just something the brain does like dreaming or remembering. There’s really nothing alarming about it.

In addition, our thoughts and feelings are not going to be able to apprehend the essence of the transcendent God. If it seems that they can, then the thing we’re calling “God” must not actually be transcendent. Traditionally, wordless prayer has been a mode of opening oneself to that inscrutable nature of God’s being.

4'33" is the most famous work of the highly imaginative composer John Cage and consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of no notes. Cage had experimented with a method for generating notes and rests to fill in different segments of time and it occurred to him that this method would eventually generate a piece that was all rests and no notes. 4’33” is a philosophical challenge, a joke, and an invitation to meditation, all rolled into one. Related to his work and these concepts, Cage liked to say, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.”

Since thoughts and language collapse as we reach out to the essence of God, this “having nothing to say” is appropriate as we try to approach that being.

Such silence might also be relevant during certain gaps between the sounds of our worship. The spaces between verses of hymns, the purely instrumental offerings, and times of prayer when there is no one recommending what we are to think are all times when, realizing no words will measure up, we can offer God our silence, and maybe God can get in a word edgewise.

When experiencing doubts, I think it is wise also to consider that we are traveling with God. Whether I am thinking or feeling or believing well on any given day, that relationship continues. Whether I think I am on the right path or feel I am wandering, the same God is caring about me and has a bird’s eye view of the whole journey. John Ylvisaker's beautiful hymn I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry conveys the sweetness of this truth.

Out of joint

We find ourselves wanting the things we shouldn’t and struggling to get ourselves to want the things we should. A world that teeters on the edge chaos much of the time is the result of each and every one of us experiencing that dynamic. Those of us who have the means to do so often try to arrange our lives so we don’t have to notice it too much, but there are times when silences stop our self-deception. Such silences are Lenten silences in that they lead through brokenness.

You speak to the tombstone with a name on it like your own, but no sound ever comes back. Something went wrong and can never be fixed.

The doctor says the chances of a meaningful recovery for your loved one are nil. You check the dictionary to make sure “nil” means what you’re afraid it does before you make the decision the hospital has been pressuring you to make. The next day, devices that kept the kidneys, lungs, and heart going are unplugged and those particular half-human/half-machine sounds subside forever.

Then, having put your hopes in the possibilities of a miraculous and unexpected new life, no heartbeat can be detected by the ultrasound.

Those are just normal occurrences on our planet today, things that happen to me or around me.

But there are people in our communities whose torment and terror we only begin to understand in our nightmares. They feel like they live in claustrophobic tombs where their vision is useless and they can hardly breathe. And when they reach for the one hand they've always trusted, it isn't there. 

We have a phrase for that.

“My God, My God. Why have you forsaken me?”

Maybe the silences that follow tragedies and surround perpetual traumas provide the space necessary for us to begin to hear a word from God. But I think Jesus suffers in those silences with us, and in the fullness of his hurting humanity, he joins us in the loss for words.

Sometimes our hymns dress Jesus up like a powerful warrior with armor and a horse. But prayerful music tells us he suffers with us, and that's a truth that ministers to us in the here and now. Here's an example of a re-writing of a militant hymn that sounds more like the way Jesus behaved when he was among us.

The Journey

As we get closer to Easter, there’s more silence, especially around Jesus.

As in the desert, it doesn’t seem that he hears from God in the garden. In that picturesque place, his anxiety is excruciating.

And when he turns to the sleeping disciples, he just hears crickets.

When he’s betrayed, the disciples flee and the sounds of their voices disappear altogether.

Jesus has very little to say before Pilate, and Pilate takes note of his silence.

Except for some shorthand references to Psalms, Jesus says virtually nothing for himself on the cross. He becomes more and more silent, finally emptying himself of everything with a child’s prayer “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

A Musical Journey

Franz Liszt’s “After a Reading of Dante” from his collection of piano pieces Years of Pilgrimage, is a work I travel with in life. Pianist friends who play this music agree that it is something you return to in many seasons and discover new and deeper layers of meaning.

Thought to be inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Inferno in particular, the music begins with a series of stark descending tri-tones appropriate to the mood of entering the realm of Satan. Throughout this introduction, Liszt incorporates silences to increase the sense of suspense and dread.

The first theme, really more of an unending moan than a melody, has virtually no silences. It might suggest the scene in Dante’s second circle in which souls, driven by their passions to sin, are relentlessly buffeted by the winds of a storm.

This theme returns many times, and on one occasion, it is transformed to the point that we are transfixed by the beauty of its halting new setting which causes us to forget its painful origins. I played this piece on my undergraduate senior recital in the old North Hall at Peabody. North Hall was several stories above the streets of Baltimore and it overlooked the parks of Mt. Vernon Place. The one most memorable moment of that recital for me was the sound of a siren making its way through the windows as I played that exquisite version of the theme. Sounds of the real pain of the world found their way to us even in that elegant, seemingly insulated time and place.

A theme of salvation and healing comes out of another Liszt's great suspenseful silences. It sounds as if from some impossibly distant location. That passage reminds me of an incident in my father’s life, a rare occasion on which he felt he might have heard an actual voice from God. While drowsily waiting in the car on a warm afternoon, he heard a voice say, “The healing is coming.” He had been struggling for a number of years with intense asthma attacks, so he initially received those words as a heartening message that physical relief was on the way. Eventually, that relief did come, but years later, we realized that the healing was actually about much deeper personal pains, It reversed some disruptive occurrences in his career that had deeply affected our life as a family. People and plans we had no idea about at the time of his hearing those words were the catalysts for that healing.

 

Sanctus

For me, the most profound moment of the Christian year at All Saints’ follows the Maundy Thursday service. It’s part of the stripping of the altar, which is an event that suggests some of the abuse Jesus experienced on the way to the cross. Over the course of fifteen minutes, each element is removed as we look on. At the end, the bare altar is revealed, and on it, we see the words, "Holy Holy Holy."

Those words have been inscribed there since before the first day any of us walked into the church, but they are almost always covered. The revelation of those words on the altar says to me that, when all else had been stripped away from Jesus – his clothing, his dignity, his life - his essence of holiness remained. 

Silence, Music, and Deep Prayer 5

“The circle begins when a song is sung – newly created or recreated.

A composer makes up a song, writing it into being.

A reader takes up the page, transposing it back into mental sound.

The performer moves the mental sound into physical sound.

A listener hears the song and joins the circle.

The circle is complete when the creator, performer, and listener 

are made one through the song.

Can you complete the circle each time you sing?”

- a challenge from Alice Parker’s The Anatomy of Melody

Kathy with Alice Parker at Hymn Society in 2015

Introduction

We started the musical portion of the evening by considering the idea that, while  stirring hymn singing can inspire us in the moment and change us over time as a strong element of corporate worship, prayerful music has power to redirect our hearts.

As we repeatedly pass through the words and shapes of a work of prayerful music, we are drawn deeper and deeper into its message. In the process, we often find:

a sense of the Spirit’s “still small voice”

           

a change in our perspective

            

a reorientation to God’s love

At times, these experiences anchor us and help us to live better.

Throughout the night, we explored Alice Parker’s Glorious God and aspects of Christian community. Glorious God is a canonic work and consists of single lines of melody which, when sung in canon, create rich chords and tone-clusters that are highly expressive of community and transcendence. 

A brief theological basis for this emphasis on community

While the Trinity is a mystery, it seems reasonable to think that a world as interdependent as ours must be the creative work of “God in three persons” 

- a God who can and does model love within His own being 

- a being in whose image humanity is created

Thus, cooperation, community, and recognition of the elements of Creation’s interconnectedness could be fundamental to our existence.

Community with Alice

Alice Parker attained notoriety through her work with Robert Shaw and is universally respected for her musical genius and greatness of spirit. As a follow-up on our study, and as we enter the season of Lent, I recommend considering Aice Parker's words in this moving musical sermon. 

Kathy and I have had the privilege of being with Ms. Parker, first on her farm in Massachusetts where Kathy was studying song-leading, then on several occasions at various conferences. 

Musicians who travel to study on her farm sit around a table in her house and gain deeper knowledge of how to respond to musical lines and to each other. They gain this knowledge by making music together with Ms. Parker's guidance.

One night, I had the privilege of walking Ms. Parker back to her house on the mountain, and with just a few words - words I don't even remember - she changed my understanding of how to compose and freed me from some of the most significant things that had been blocking my work.  I am certain she has done the same for many, many others.

Glorious God

Not being Catholic, Ms. Parker sought a text for her Mass that would follow the essential shape of the Mass but would highlight certain facets of her own theology. Amy Jo Shoonover provided such a text.

The Kyrie is Trinitarian and addresses God as glorious, loving, and healing. The focus is on being brought together by a God like that as one enters worship with this text. 

We quickly learned the tune of this Kyrie by rote and that prompted some discussion about how many of us are bound to the page which can sometimes degrade the quality of our actual listening. Thus, we almost immediately saw the spiritual ramifications of working in the way that Ms. Parker usually does: learning to sing by listening to one another makes us very aware of how well we do or do not listen. A good practice of listening is something we need for developing healthy community.

After Dr. Cotton shared some teaching on silence and on how we might consider the thoughts that come to us as we are offering our silence to God as an offering, we sang the Kyrie again and discovered that, while we might have felt tentative as individuals, as a group, we knew it better than we thought we did. This speaks of the importance of community and also suggests something of the profundity of Ms. Parker’s work. The following passage from her book The Anatomy of Melody (p. 121) explains her aims in composing.   

“When rhythm, pitch, and word combine in just the right proportions, an organism like a living form results. This form is balanced within and cohesive without, pulsing with life. It is a whole with a beginning, middle, and end. It sets up an expectation and fulfills it . . . It seems inevitable. It lasts.

“Melodies that endure are like fundamental physical forms: cloud, stream, tree. They have a rightness in which each element is subordinate to the whole and everything works together for structural unity.”

Producing work like this is a lofty goal that requires humility on the part of the composer and the music. The composer’s hand should be discrete to the point that the music seems to have always existed as a part of Creation, and no moment in the music should draw undue attention to itself upsetting the sense of wholeness.

A series of excerpts from The Anatomy of Melody helps us think through the link between singing and community. On page 186, three paragraphs end with these wonderfully insightful sentences.

1. “The trick is to anticipate what the singers need in energy or beat or accent or mood.”

Here she is describing what has been shared by leaders of singing in various cultures and times. Leading singing is an act of community that involves great sensitivity and well-calibrated response on the part of the leader.

2. "We don’t progress further until the singers have realized that they must listen and allow their voices to join the sound of the whole group."

This is Ms. Parker’s modus operandi. She expects the level of engagement with one another through sound to be high. All will move together and do so well, or no forward movement will occur. Ms. Parker maintains this approach in a remarkably gentle but demanding way.

3. “If it’s well-taught, it is cradled in the singers’ inmost memory.”

Full participation in performance that is beautiful is the destination. The whole process moves incrementally and with liveliness toward that point of arrival.

As we discussed during our first night of our class, information can become deeply embedded in the human brain through musical means. Ms. Parker is modeling how to treat that process as a holy endeavor.

Next we turned our attention to the Sanctus and Benedictus.

This portion of Ms. Parker’s Mass begins “Holy, Holy, Holy unimaginable Pow’r.”

This power is unimaginable in magnitude. We simply cannot frame in our minds the power of the “Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

But it is also a power unimaginable in quality. We are unable to envision a power that cannot be corrupted or become oppressive but is willing to make itself vulnerable, instead.

Finally, the text does not say that God has this power. God is this power.

As we sang this portion in canon and seated in a circle, we discovered that the words “unimaginable power” form a continuous ring throughout the music that lifts the singers into worship of the eternal and transcendent God.

We briefly discussed the following line: “Earth and Heav’n sing your praise. Osanna.” “Earth and Heav’n” is clearly text-painted with an arpeggio ascending from “Earth” to “Heav’n,” and “Osanna” is a word of praise with overtones of deliverance.

Still seated in a circle, we concluded our evening by singing a portion of the Agnus Dei. The text begins, “Lamb, Lamb, Lamb of God who bears our burdens: Forgive our sin.”

I think this repetition of “Lamb” has potential for causing us to consider that this liberation is achieved by a means that is also unimaginable to us. The thought is extraordinary. This liberation is achieved not by a military force, not by a strong leader, not by a brilliant preacher, not even by a good liturgy – but by a lamb that was slain. One who did not defend himself bears our burdens and forgives our sins.

Some readers might enjoy this video which shows pictures of Ms. Parker's farm accompanied by the first movement ("Mountains") of my symphony named for her farm. Inspired by Ms. Parker's commitment to participatory music-making, this little symphony was written for an ensemble of amateur and beginner string players along with a clarinet and a horn. The sweet horn playing was done by Kathy Hulin.

Children of Eden and Faith Integration

Here's a little speech I recently gave for the cast of our upcoming musical, Children of Eden. While it was a response to some specific issues a few cast members raised, I think it gives some nice examples of what one might mean by faith integration in the performing arts.

Children of Eden and Faith Integration

Charles J. Hulin IV

February 1, 2016

In what follows, I hope to provide some perspective on how to engage meaningfully with professional work in the arts as a Christian.

Some of you have expressed concerns about the retelling of Genesis in Children of Eden and about ways in which the musical might be misrepresenting the God we Christians say we believe in.

I am here to assure you that your performance of this musical will not be an easily misinterpreted stand-alone event. Instead, it will be introduced in such a way as to make the following points clear to the audience. And by introduced, I mean by speaking and in print . . .

As I share with you tonight, I might become emotional, passionate, and vulnerable because that’s how I am and we’re Pentecostal here.  It’s also because we are trying to preserve the possibility of doing musicals in our community in a way that has the potential for changing people’s lives.

Here are the points we are going to make sure the audience hears and understands before they see the musical.

1. This is not the way the story plays out in Genesis. This musical is a work of historical fiction, which means the authors took their outline from the Bible and created some details of their own to engage the audience. People will understand that and we just need to tell them it’s the case.

2. Not only is this not exactly like Genesis, it does not clearly present the image of God we generally embrace as a community of Christians.

3. No one involved with this production particularly believes that what is seen on the stage is how things actually happened.

4. The people on the stage are acting. They are pretending to be other people with views and experiences and feelings that are not their own.

  

Both our audience and our selves need to be aware of these things and to accept them since they are the basic facts of the situation. Once we establish this foundation, we can move on to real faith integration and get something spiritual out of this work.

So in addition to letting everyone know that what they see on stage is not exactly what’s in the Bible, we will also talk about some of the following in our introduction.

1. We will invite the audience to go home and read Genesis for themselves. A great way to follow up on a performance like this would be for audience members to talk with their Christian and Jewish friends about what they believe. Personally, I think being involved with this musical will be a great opportunity for each of us to witness to our peers and family as the material on stage should get some deep conversations started. I’ll be praying for that to happen. 

2. Regarding those deep conversations I hope you end up having, the art of this musical is the thing that’s going to provoke them. While scripture gives us some answers, art’s role is to raise questions that lead us to think and feel more deeply. 

And the questions this musical raises are classical theological questions. Here are a few of them.

Why do we reject the goodness God intends for us?

How did evil come to be in a world God created and why is it linked to knowledge?

How much is God like us? Is God vengeful? Does God curse his children? Does God get hurt? Does God change?

What does it mean for God to be the father of humanity? In what ways are Adam and Noah fathers of humanity?

How much do we confuse our experience of our earthly fathers with that of our heavenly father? I had a great dad, but before I could truly accept and love him, before there could be some real peace between us, I had to realize that I was expecting things from him that only God could provide. Some of you probably had fathers who it seemed didn’t really know how to love you, and I’m here to tell you that can confuse you about how much God loves you.

And the questions go on:

How do we reconcile the sometimes seemingly genocidal God of the Old Testament with the loving Jesus of the New? And is it okay to wipe out a whole race when you think God tells you to?

How should we respond to violence whether it is a random local act or a global apocalypse? Should we isolate ourselves from those we see as different or should we come together in those situations? 

Those are Christian college-level questions. Those are questions that Seussical would never get us discussing but Children of Eden will. I think that gives the Holy Spirit a lot to work with.

3. The audience needs to know this musical isn’t just about Genesis. As the musical encourages us, we need to look beyond the historical fiction on the stage to its relevance to our living in the here and now. That’s where being alive to God comes into play (and into the play). If we stay engaged all the way through to the climax of Children of Eden, if we stay focused on getting to the real point its creators intended, we will see that it is about both the struggles and the goodness of family. It is about what it describes as the hardest part of love, which is the letting go. When you’re old like me, that means a lot.

And it’s about how we ought to conduct ourselves when it seems like God’s not there. Throughout the musical we literally see that God is there even when the characters don’t feel like it.

And it’s about the “most precious and terrible” gift we have in life: choice.

As the authors write and as you will sing, “Our hands can choose to drop the knife, our hearts can choose to stop the hating. For every moment of our life is a beginning.” And a little later, “There is no journey that has gone so far we cannot stop and change direction.”

I am certain that there are actually thousands of people in Lakeland who need to hear that message who aren’t going to go to a church to hear it, and it might not be preached at the church even if they do go. But some of them will be in your audience.

So I repeat that we will endeavor to get these points across so that the Spirit can use your efforts to bring about redemption in the lives of your audience members. I respectfully request that anyone who is considering dropping out, reconsider, as I believe we are working towards a powerful moment of ministry in our community that can only happen if we stay true to our commitment to the process. I implore you to keep your minds and hearts oriented toward that ultimate goal.  

Finally, if you are personally struggling with any of the material in the musical, I invite you to engage, one on one, with my colleagues or me so that we can work together to grow spiritually and to bring about things God wants to happen.